I was lucky enough to be on my first funded writing retreat this autumn. It was slightly broken up due to tasks I had to complete in between but I managed to obtain just over a month away in total, which was magic.
This writing retreat also involved spending a lot of time in nature – including camping on the cliffs by the sea in an equinoctial gale (yes, the tent did blow down, but luckily not when I was in it!) and in between bouts of writing I took long walks and swims. I picked
blackberries and hips and haws, brewing teas and arranging wildflower posies of nasturtiums, vetches, gorse and yarrow for my fellow guests to enjoy. I found being in nature galvanised the writing so much better and I was able to complete a draft of my play, which is what I was aiming for in the time available.
I’ve been developing a consistent nature practice since the pandemic when walks were prescribed to us for health purposes – so my working day is punctuated at least once or twice by regular short walks in local parks and I now volunteer as a local gardener, garden installation maker and plantsman when I can.
We naturally associate nature with finding freedom and our authentic selves – from the Japanese invention of forest bathing to Martin Luther King’s ‘I’ve Been To the Top of a Mountain Top’ or Rousseau’s ‘Promenades’. Then there is the parable of the phantom city, where a group of travellers are looking for a beautiful city in the Himalayas. On the way, they meet a travel guide who will take them there. When they arrive, they feel rested, but the next day they find the city is gone and they need to get on their way again to discover the next beautiful city.
For me, writing and travelling have always gone hand in hand. I was placed as a few-month-old baby on a train rack on the way to Italy where my parents lived in my early years and I’ve always thought about travel in terms of gaining insight rather than simply keeping up the pace or making great strides, achieving milestones et cetera.
But there is also the metaphor of the primrose path, taking time to pause and take in the view, breathing deep – and also, of course, losing our way in the middle of life’s journey, like Dante’s alter ego in Inferno. Travel is not always insightful: it can be something that is simply a waste of time and we can lose ourselves in it.
During the last part of my retreat, however, my partner joined me and so I had the pleasure of sharing some of the sights that I had seen alone. I was able to rediscover the things that I had seen and discovered in my daily ramblings together with him: the views of bird sanctuary islands, the sunsets, the sacred sites, the wildlife – let alone sea swimming.
Above all the writing retreat helped me to clear a backlog of stuck emotions and a sense of unworthiness about my own projects and endeavours. Facing nature – the sea, the winds – I was reinspired to climb what had seemed an impossible mountain of work when I was back in town. It was as though I was able to trace the thread of what I wanted to write through the landscape I was walking in. It reminded me of a book I read at college called The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin. The Songlines are the tools of navigation that aboriginal people use when trying to navigate across a great desert – the landscape is made sacred as a means for remembering the stories that keep the aborigine people together. So when we are walking we are literally walking a new narrative for ourselves. And if we’re not sure what the next narrative is meant to be then finding a new path – literally – across a landscape we don’t particularly know, is going to open up new perspectives on what we are trying to achieve whether in writing or any other creative endeavour. As Rebecca Solnit reminds us in Wanderlust – A History of Walking (1970), the landscape becomes our tool for creating a new narrative.
If you are currently facing a block in your creative practice or finding an impasse in your life in some way, I highly recommend taking a break and going for a long walk or two – or perhaps a hike. Even if you take a walk in wintertime, that will also help you to reflect on where you are in your life’s journey.
As Solnit writes:
‘Roads are a record of those who have gone before, and to follow them is to follow people who are no longer there – not saints and gods anymore but shepherds, hunters, engineers, emigrants, peasants to market or just commuters. Symbolic structures such as labyrinths call attention to the nature of all paths, all journeys.’ (Solnit: 1970: 72)
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